True Bliss (7 page)

"Hey, Bobby," Sebastian said, when the sisters were gone. "Do you suppose you could keep an eye on my truck?"

"Why?"

"Oh, just in case."

"Why?"

Sebastian smiled at the child. "You're a wise man. Never do anything you're not sure of. My dog, Beater. He's in the back and he gets nervous if he's left for long."

"You shouldn't leave dogs in cars. They can hydrate."

"De—" Sebastian pressed his lips together briefly. "You're right, but he's okay for a few minutes. And he's not shut in. He just doesn't like anyone getting close to my truck when I'm not

there. Would you watch, and come and tell me if anyone goes near?"

Bobby considered. "No one comes around in the afternoons. They're working. I'm not allowed to bother any of them. They're artists, y'know. They paint and write and stuff. There's one lady who's with Vic. She makes pots n'stuff. He's a painter. I'm not allowed to go there at all because the lady's his—alive. She's—"

"Vic's life model," Bliss said, aware of warmth in her cheeks. She couldn't make herself think of what to do or say next.

"That's interesting," Sebastian told Bobby. "I need to speak to Bliss and I worry about Beater. Would you watch him, please?"

Bobby released Sebastian's hand and said gravely, "Okay. I'll tell you if anyone comes." His thin, tanned legs bore him rapidly from the kitchen, to the terrace, and out of sight.

Sebastian closed the door quietly and faced Bliss. His arms hung at his sides. She watched him make fists, brace his legs apart, breathe deeply enough to stretch his shirt over his heavily muscled chest and shoulders.

She wouldn't allow herself to look away.

He crossed the room and stood on the opposite side of the kitchen table, looking down at her. No hint of gray showed in his dark, wavy hair, or in the hair that showed at the open neck of his denim shirt. She had to lower her face. The kid who had once dropped out of school for a year still favored jeans that fitted every inch, but the inches were more solid, even more impossible to avoid staring at—repeatedly.

She felt him duck his head. She closed her eyes and her heart turned. He'd always done that, ducked his head to make her look at him.

The only sound in the room came from a box fan jammed into an open window.

Bliss smelled Sebastian, a clean smell, simple soap and laundered denim.

He touched her.

The tips of his fingers settled just beneath her jaw. His thumb

moved lightly over her cheek. When Bliss opened her eyes, his were on the skin he stroked. The corners of his mouth twisted downward. Bitterness? Anger? A thin, white scar marred the upper bow of his mouth on the right side.

Once she'd known everything about him, or thought she did. Now she knew nothing—nothing of his life since the afternoon before he'd left Seattle.

"Fifteen years," he said.

She couldn't speak.

His eyes flickered to hers. "I'm sorry."

Tears? Why now? How could they come now? And how could he turn up after all this time and say, simply, "I'm sorry," when it was too late for sorry.

"Sounds asinine." He kept stroking her cheek, back and forth. "Not enough. Nothing would be enough, would it?"

Bliss fought the tears and opened her mouth to breathe.

Sebastian's thumb shifted to her bottom lip. "What a mess. What a bloody awful mess. I've wanted to come to you ever since."

If she answered, she'd break down.

"The early years were hell. Then I thought it was too late. Then I felt I had to try to prove I was worth something before trying to put it all back together."

She began to tremble, then to shudder.

"I was a fool and I knew it. I know it now. A fool for letting it all happen in the first place—having to leave. Thinking I had to leave. And then I was sure it was too late. You'd have your own life. Be married to someone else."

Why didn 't you call, or write? Just to let me know how you were, that you were okay? At least in those first weeks when I wanted to go to sleep and never wake up because I was afraid you were dead. I couldn 't believe you d leave me like that unless you were dead. I wanted to be with you, so I didn't want to live anymore.

"You never married," Sebastian said. "I couldn't believe

my ... I couldn't believe it at first. Say something, Bliss. Please."

She pushed herself to the back of her chair, pulling away from his touch. "You look well." Inane.

"So do you. You're so beautiful it hurts." He raised his face to the ceiling. "I sound like an idiot. But it's true. You don't look any different."

"Yes. No different except for those fifteen years, huh?" Now she sounded angry. She mustn't let him know how she'd counted those years, how she'd pored over photographs of him in business journals, and over articles about his ventures.

"You're angry with me."

"No!" Yes. Yes, she was angry. She was insanely angry. He'd messed up her life.

"I don't blame you. You've got every right to be angry. Vengeful, even."

"I'm not angry. And I'm not vengeful. I'm not. . . anything anymore. I'm happy."

"Are you?"

"Yes. Yes, I am, of course I am. I'm doing things that matter to me. I'm making a difference, even if it's only small."

"Why aren't you married?"

"Not everyone wants to be married."

"You did. And I wanted to be."

"And you are," she reminded him, shifting in the seat, so desperate, so confused she couldn't sit still. "How's your wife? How many children do you have now?"

"Bliss—"

"No." She couldn't stand this, not for another instant. He overwhelmed her. And he shouldn't be here, had no right to walk in here. "I want you to go away. I don't know why you're here at all."

"Don't you?"

"No. Oh, no, no, I don't."

"I had to come."

"You didn't have to come before." She raised her chin. The

burning in her eyes didn't matter anymore, or the wetness on her cheeks. What he saw, what he thought, didn't matter anymore. "You left me without a word—except from your sister. And you never as much as sent me a note."

He came rapidly around the table. "You were hurting, Bliss."

"You're right. I was hurting. How could I not be hurting when I loved—" She massaged her brow—"I loved you. I was going to run away and marry you. God, I hate this. I never wanted you to see how you'd hurt me. How can you come back now? Why have you come back? Drat! It's unbelievable."

"I was trapped. I couldn't get out of it and I didn't want to make things worse by prolonging things for you."

Bliss shook her head. "Forget it. It's all been over forever now. I don't care anymore. I'm just crying out of some maudlin empathy for the person I used to be. It hurt then. It doesn't hurt anymore."

"It never stopped hurting for me."

She dropped her hands into her lap and stared at him. "How can you lie like that?"

"I'm not lying."

"No? Look at you." Didn't he know she could see his sexual reaction to what was happening between them? Passion, even passionate anger, turned him on. She flushed and her heart raced. "Sebastian Plato, success story. You've got it all, old friend. If you'd been upset about walking away from what we had, you'd have tried to let me know. You'd have tried to help me understand. And don't tell me you've lived with a broken heart for fifteen years and just now decided to come and tell me. I don't believe you."

"Of course you don't." He stood over her. His leg touched her knee. She felt him above her. She felt his heat. The sting of her own arousal disgusted and frightened her. He told her, "How do I make you believe I came back to Washington because of you?"

"Don't make me laugh!" She tilted back her head to see his

face. "What would make you think I'm the kind of fool who'd buy that drivel?"

"Oh, I know you're no fool, Dr. Winters."

He'd researched her pretty thoroughly.

"I went along thinking you must have a comfortable life with someone else," he said. "Then . . . Hell, I don't know what made me do it. I guess I got low enough, lonely enough—empty enough. I just started trying to find out what you'd done with yourself. I couldn't find any record of a marriage. I couldn't believe it. A woman like you never married?"

"Women—not all women need a man to make them feel complete."

"You do."

Bliss's vision blurred. She took off her glasses and set them down.

"I remember how you came alive with me. You loved me, Bliss. And I loved you."

Past tense. What would he say if she told him she'd never stopped loving him, that she considered herself sick because she didn't think she would ever stop loving him?

"What do you want, Sebastian?"

He made no sudden moves. She was aware of the slow descent of his big hands onto her shoulders, of his looping his fingers around her neck and raising her chin with his thumbs until she could either lower her eyelids, or stare into his eyes— so close the gold flecks glittered.

Bliss stared into his eyes.

He bent over her. His mouth settled on her forehead, just rested there, then he kissed her softly and she heard a small, broken sound from deep in his throat.

The next kiss found her lips.

Not the same. The same man, the same falling, sweetly drowning sensations, but a different time and place. Once kisses had been enough. Kisses and touches, and the promise of more to come had been enough. They weren't enough now—they were too much, too much to endure when they tore into her,

laid her open, whipped to burning reality the hundreds of days and nights of settling for the loss of him.

Sebastian found her hands and drew them around his neck. He lifted her to her feet and surrounded her, held her so tightly she couldn't breathe. But she didn't want to breathe. She only wanted these kisses, these sensations.

They struggled against each other, pressed closer, passed their hands greedily over each other's body. The time fled away. They were teenagers and they were adults. All at once, all blending. The heat of their youth became the fire of their adult coming together.

You are not a teenager.

Bliss's lungs burned. She gasped, and pushed at Sebastian. He held her even more firmly. His heavy erection probed her belly. His thighs flanked hers, trapped hers.

She drove her fists into his shoulders and turned her head away.

He released her so abruptly she toppled into the chair. Just as quickly, she was on her feet again and putting distance between them.

"I'm sorry," he muttered. "I shouldn't have done that."

Bliss reached the sinks and put her hands behind her to brace her shaky weight. "No. Neither should I."

"I didn't come here to kiss you."

"Of course not."

"At least . . ." He sat in the chair she'd vacated and buried his face in his hands. "I wanted to kiss you when I saw you. I want to kiss you again, now. And that's not all I want."

Revelation.

"Why are you here? Really here?"

"To see you. I told you. I came to Washington, to Bellevue, to see you. Some crazy notion made me decide to come here and mend fences."

"Crazy," she agreed, wanting to believe him.

"I'm not married, Bliss."

She bit into her swollen bottom lip.

"I haven't been for years."

She shouldn't be glad, but she was.

"No one wanted me to come here. I did it anyway."

Surely he didn't expect her to believe he'd done so because of her. "This area's very different from what it was when we were kids."

"Uh-huh. Actually it's been a natural expansion for me for a long time, but I've kept away."

She frowned.

"I stayed out of the Northwest because ... It seemed best. Then I decided I wanted to prove I wasn't the punk all those people thought I was."

"The people where you lived? The people we went to school with?"

"Yeah. All of them."

"So you're setting up shop here."

"Not because of them anymore. Oh, I want to prove myself, but that's not the main reason. I wanted to see if there was a chance for you and me, Bliss."

Her blood stood still, and her heart.

"Now I know there is. I felt it. When I kissed you, I felt it. You still feel something for me."

She still felt something for him? Was that any way to describe all that raging, pent-up sexual and emotional hunger he'd unleashed?

He smiled at her, the lopsided smile she'd never been able to erase from her memory. "You may be a little thinner, Bliss."

"You're bigger." She looked at the holes in the toes of her sneakers. "I'm a lot older."

"You're thirty-two. Perfect age. I'm thirty-five. Not so bad, huh?"

"This is too much."

"I know. But we're going to work our way through it. I used to love how fragile you felt in my arms. Made me feel protective. Funny, I never wanted that with anyone else—not before or since."

"You're"—she needed to show him she wasn't still an innocent kid—"You're aroused."

He gave a short, hard laugh. "That obvious, huh? Yeah, I am. All it took was one look at you. Does that offend you?"

She tried to appear unmoved. "It happens."

He was silent for a moment. "Not to me. Not like this. But I guess you have the same effect on every man."

Bliss tugged on the horrible shirt. "I haven't noticed."

"Zoya showed me the press release."

Zoya. Bliss glanced at him. "Press release?" Zoya was the model, the gorgeous creature who was the figurehead for Sebastian's modeling and talent agencies.

"The most recent of a number that have appeared, evidently. About WOT Women of Today."

"Oh, that."

"You never used to be a joiner."

"I'm not a joiner now." How would they handle it? How would they deal with everything that had happened since they were last together? Could they?

"The release says you're the chairperson for the action committee that intends to make sure Raptor Vision never opens its doors in Bellevue."

Stillness enveloped Bliss. She studied Sebastian. He was serious now—business serious. "How long have you been back?"